New God Proposal: Haedan, The Minstrel

[TehDruid]

Description:

Haedan the Minstrel (also known as the Wandering Bard) is the god of poetry, music and inspiration. Followers of this god are blessed with great ability to manipulate sound and affect creatures around them through the use of music.
No backgrounds start with this religion.

Racial restrictions:

The god is of Neutral alignment, it has no problems with accepting the undead or demons.
Demigods can't be followers of any god, as usual.

Appreciates:

When you kill foes that lack the gift of speech, that is, most (if not all) unintelligent monsters in the game. The god's worst foe is Silent Spectres. Chance of +1 piety depending on usual stuff (monster HD and your XL)
When you pray over eligible scrolls to convert them to scrolls of noise. Medium chance of +1 piety.
When you use-ID items (regardless of the results) or use a scroll of identify on an unidentified item. High chance of +1 Piety.
When you cast spells related to sound (Projected Noise for example). Low-Medium chance of +1 Piety.
When you destroy Curare Needles. Medium-High chance of +1 Piety.
Especially lucky followers may encounter magical pieces of equipment gifted with the ability to speak (noisy ego artifact weapons) or to otherwise produce sound (shield of the gong). Whenever one of those items produces a sound you have a medium chance of +1 piety.

Deprecates:

Abandonment.
Inactivity. Staying too long in one place doing nothing doesn't help with inspiration. Piety loss every bunch of hundreds of turns.
When you use Curare Needles which prevent otherwise capable of speech monsters from using their breath. Piety loss.
The use of scrolls of silence and the silence spell, or any other means of silence. Excommunication. (Note that scrolls of Silence are auto-ID'ed when you join this god)

Given Abilities:

Piety level (0): "Whisperer"

Scroll Sacrifice: Sacrifice any scroll by praying over them to produce a Scroll of Noise (the god replaces the text with notes) for each scroll sacrificed to be used for your other god-given abilities. Scrolls of noise and silence are auto-ID'ed.
Curare Needle Sacrifice: Destroys curare needles on the floor.

Piety level (*): "Smooth Talker"

Manipulative (Passive): By using your witty tongue, you have a one-time chance when you reach low health (under 25% MaxHP) for any pursuing monster in LOS to become neutral for a bunch of turns, allowing you to escape.
The success rate of this ability depends on your piety level. At max piety, it has a very high chance of working (like 80%?) This could possibly involve some of your gold vanishing, too.

Piety level (**): "Whistler"

Piercing Sound (Activated): You direct a wave of sound at one of your foes in a manner that can inflict harm upon their bodies. Causes low-medium damage and has a medium chance of making monsters permanently deaf, which makes them immune to further sound-based damage (screaming sword is an example), but also grants them a medium chance of miscasting spells with a vocal component, with the normal unpredictable effects of miscasting. Demons gesture, so they're not affected by the miscast penalty. They still take the initial sonic damage and have a chance to become deaf, though. {1 piety, breath, scroll of noise, food (low)}

Piety level (***): "Singer"

Cheerful Tune (passive): Haedan's melodies fill your head at all times, granting you permanent immunity to sound-based afflictions. Even when you stand in a field of silence, you're being protected from it, allowing you to use scrolls, spells and abilities.

Piety level (****): "Charismatic Performer"

Lullaby (Activated): You perform a soothing melody that causes enemies that have the ability to hear in your LOS and fail a MR check to fall asleep for some turns. This magical slumber prevents them from waking up by other sounds caused in the vicinity. They will wake up if they receive any kind of damage unless it is poison, though. That means, passive poison damage by the state, not by spells like poison bolt. {2 piety, breath, scroll of noise, food (medium)}

Piety level (*****): "Melodious {race}"

No new abilities.

Piety level (******): "{race} Minstrel"

Performance (Activated): Your otherwordly ability to affect the ears of those around you can instill different effects on them and you. The ability takes 3 turns to use. This ability doesn't affect monsters deaf or otherwise immune to noise effects.

You get to choose from one of the following effects:

Peace Anthem: High chance of everything in your LOS to become neutral for some turns, not permanently though. Like Elyvilon's pacifying skills, this works better for natural beasts, then humanoids, then demons/undead.
Chaotic Cacophony: This causes totally random effects to each monster around you, some may be affected by fear, confusion, lowered str/int/dex or might go berserk, get increased strength, etc. Weighted more towards negative effects.
Shattering Screams: Causes damage to all monsters that are vulnerable to Lee's Rapid Deconstruction in your LOS. It can't break any surrounding walls though.
Inspiring Sonnet: Boosts your dominant stat by 10, increases all of your skills by 5 levels and makes you immune to fear effects (is there any? ).

All four abilites right above each cost 4 piety, breath, scroll of noise, food (high).

Instrument of War MK1: Once during the course of the game, the minstrel can bless your weapon with the {noisy} brand which enables it to behave like the singing sword (being able to inflict sonic damage in an aoe when under high tension).
or
Instrument of War MK2: Starting at piety level * Haedan grants you the screaming 1 mutation and converts it to singing 1. This ability grows in power with your piety, reaching Singing 2 at *** and 3 at *****. This mutations goes back to screaming if you become excommunicated/abandon the god. It also doesn't revert to lower levels once upgraded, if your piety levels drop. This mutation allows YOU to scream under hight tension.

Punishments:

Focused sonic damage on you.
Area sonic damage. This affects you AND all the monsters around you. Deals less single-target damage than the above.
Sleep.
Chance of miscast effect when casting spells that require you to talk.
Can wake up monsters that are sleeping/resting in your LOS.
Can inspire monsters you fight, causing them to gain bonuses to whatever area they focus (if melee they grow stronger, if casters they gain increased damage with spells)

[Blade]

One quick comment: Piety for casting spells would be horribly broken and would encourage grinding. I'll let others comment on the rest, but that bit stood out.

[TehDruid]

One quick comment: Piety for casting spells would be horribly broken and would encourage grinding. I'll let others comment on the rest, but that bit stood out.

I said low/medium chance of piety. But let's say very low, then. What if it has like 10% chance to give piety... And I believe I already wrote this in the OP, Piety decays every bunch of hundred turns so waiting for your mana to refill to grind wouldn't be a good option, with the low odds of getting the piety back and even more. Then again, there's the crystal ball and staff of channeling, I suppose those could theoretically break the ability. I added this mostly for flavour, but it can be balanced If one wants it to get balanced.

[TwilightPhoenix]

Interesting concepts here, but there's a few problems that I see. A quick run over, don't have time to provide many details here.

Mummies can speak just fine.

Most of the piety-gain methods are scummy. Curare destruction is very situational and pretty rare. Non-speaking kills means you'll be hard pressed to find piety in Zot, Tomb, Hell, and Pan, putting this god in a "useless in the endgame" situation other gods like Fedhas suffer from purely from piety issues.

Curare also doesn't prevent speech.

This god should deprecate using any source of silence.

For the abilities themselves...

Scroll Sacrifice: What benefit does the player have more making Scrolls of Noise, other than using them in Shoals? And why only useless scrolls?

Manipulative: Flavorful, though neutral monsters will still attack the player if they're in the way, so it's weaker than it sounds.

Piercing Sound: This ability runs contradictory to all of your other abilities as well as the god deprecating things that can't speak or prevent noises. Deafness is not in amazing effect and I do not think monsters are able to miscast spells.

Cheerful Tune: Silence immunity is huge. Mennas would complain so hard about this ability and this would easily shove this god into a "primary caster" god role.

Lullaby: Interesting and useful, great for stabbers. Not sure why poison is randomly supported here and here alone though.

Performance: This seems sort of like a watered-down version of Zin's Recite. Peace Anthem would be handy, but not as powerful as it seems, especially since it takes three turns. Chaotic Cacophony sounds like old Recite, which was changed because it wasn't very useful (making enemies Berserk is always a bad idea, unless they're an uber spellcaster with wimpy physical attacks). Shattering Scream is extremely situational and will only affect a few monsters (whereas Recite can injure and kill quite a few things, including undead, orcs, demons, chaotic monsters, priests, etc.) Inspiring Sonnet seems cool, but the three-turn requirement would make it hard to use since you'd need to pre-buff before you're sure whether you're facing a pack or a lone monster.

Instrument of War: This is cool, but I suspect gifting of brands is a bit common. Kiku gives Pain, TSO gives Holy Wrath, Lugonu gives Distortion, Trog frequently gives Anti-Magic (along with everything else), Oka gives everything, Jiyva can give Acid to unarmed attacks, and I think Xom can gift Chaos if he's in the mood to do so.

But, that's all I can say for now, I need to run to work.

[twelwe]

This is interesting, but looks like a mashup of all the Holy Gods. Smooth Talker is too close to other God life saving abilities, and comes way too early. Consequently, the chance of success is way too low to be reliable, and a slowly increasing chance wont be understood by someone who uses the ability, fails, and feels other escape options would be better attempted than one that started with a very high failure rate. However much you lower the chance of piety gain for certain spells being cast - no matter how much you tune it to piety loss - people will still attempt to grind it. Performance is just a rewritten version of Zin's Recite ability. While reading this, I was just waiting for the {noisy} proposal, and it comes in place exactly like TSO's blessing. What is the benefit here to having a noisy weapon, though? It could nullify lullaby by harming everyone, and make whistler undesirable later in the game. I think if you added more benefits to creating noise and eliminated reasons to avoid using noise based damage you could have a workable idea. I really like Singer and think it has an appropriate place as a God power at three stars - but I think there are very few applications for it in the early game.

Some further ideas:
Screaming mutation is changed to Singing
Haedan gives you the Singing mutation at *, increasing it at *** and *****. Edit: let me repeat that there should be more reasons for noise to exist, and most of them should be beneficial in combat. There is no reason with your current proposal to use a noisy weapon above any other brand, and especially over some artifacts. That is why the player himself, not an item, should be noisy. Also, if the player abandons the God, the mutation remains, without the benefits of noisy combat.
Silence should exist earlier in the game much in the way Sky Beasts were added to teach newer players how to deal with invisibility so that Singer will be a meaningful ability when the player gets it
Reagents for God abilities just aren't fun. I think Fedhas is one of the most interesting and unique Gods in the game and I've worshiped under the plant god hundreds of times but the unfairness of a bad fruit spawn rate is outside the control of the player and unintentionally limits the powers of the God. Some people argue this as making the choice to use the ability "interesting," but I can't grasp this in a game where consumable use is encouraged and greedy behavior leads to death.

[TehDruid]

Okay people, many comments to review...
This is my first god proposal so yup, it might be very messy.

Mummies can speak just fine. - FIXED

Most of the piety-gain methods are scummy. - I see what you're saying. Use-IDing all floor trash would be scummy idd. What I had in mind is ID of unique item types (the different potions, scrolls, spellbooks, wands, etc, essentially the stuff that there's to be discovered when you use the \ command in game)

Curare destruction is very situational and pretty rare. - Curare destruction is just a small bonus, like Yredelemnul liking it a lot when you kill hollies (there's no easy supply of those, like with demons).

Non-speaking kills means you'll be hard pressed to find piety in Zot, Tomb, Hell, and Pan, putting this god in a "useless in the endgame" situation other gods like Fedhas suffer from purely from piety issues. - That's why by then you will have the option of adding the noisy brand on your weapon, which will keep your piety high when you are almost out of ID-able stuff (since you've pretty much seen everything by then). Getting an early noisy weapon could be OP I guess. But it does have the usual problem with stealthy characters, doesn't it.

Curare also doesn't prevent speech. - It stops you from using breath skills so the god doesn't like it.

This god should deprecate using any source of silence. - True. ADDED

For the abilities themselves...

Scroll Sacrifice: What benefit does the player have more making Scrolls of Noise, other than using them in Shoals? And why only useless scrolls? - You Need scrolls of Noise to use the 3 activated abilities. You could make it "all scrolls" I guess. I'll add it to the OP.

Manipulative: Flavorful, though neutral monsters will still attack the player if they're in the way, so it's weaker than it sounds. - It's an early passive ability that gets better with higher piety, it shouldn't be anything more than that.

Piercing Sound: This ability runs contradictory to all of your other abilities as well as the god deprecating things that can't speak or prevent noises. Deafness is not in amazing effect and I do not think monsters are able to miscast spells. - Please note that deafness doesn't make the monster unable to speak. I was just thinking of a direct damaging ability with some side effects. It may not be great, I guess.

Cheerful Tune: Silence immunity is huge. Mennas would complain so hard about this ability and this would easily shove this god into a "primary caster" god role. - True but silence is way too situational in any part of the game, imho. So it's not that OP.

Lullaby: Interesting and useful, great for stabbers. Not sure why poison is randomly supported here and here alone though. - I'm sorry, I meant poison by the status effect that does damage over time, not by directly offensive spells like poison bolt. FIXED

Performance: This seems sort of like a watered-down version of Zin's Recite. Peace Anthem would be handy, but not as powerful as it seems, especially since it takes three turns. Chaotic Cacophony sounds like old Recite, which was changed because it wasn't very useful (making enemies Berserk is always a bad idea, unless they're an uber spellcaster with wimpy physical attacks). Shattering Scream is extremely situational and will only affect a few monsters (whereas Recite can injure and kill quite a few things, including undead, orcs, demons, chaotic monsters, priests, etc.) Inspiring Sonnet seems cool, but the three-turn requirement would make it hard to use since you'd need to pre-buff before you're sure whether you're facing a pack or a lone monster. - This final ability may need to be reworked or entirely remade, I guess. I'd like to hear some more opinions on the matter.

Instrument of War: This is cool, but I suspect gifting of brands is a bit common. Kiku gives Pain, TSO gives Holy Wrath, Lugonu gives Distortion, Trog frequently gives Anti-Magic (along with everything else), Oka gives everything, Jiyva can give Acid to unarmed attacks, and I think Xom can gift Chaos if he's in the mood to do so. - Your point being? This particular Noisy brand is a very different brand than anything else in the game. It comes with some severe disadvantages. It's your choice whether you use it to rack up piety more easily or not.

A slowly increasing chance wont be understood by someone who uses the ability, fails, and feels other escape options would be better attempted than one that started with a very high failure rate. - It's been in my OP before I edited it: it's a passive ability. You don't get to choose whether it's used or not.

However much you lower the chance of piety gain for certain spells being cast - no matter how much you tune it to piety loss - people will still attempt to grind it. - But if the numbers turn negative most of the time it's their loss (literally, of piety). But I did put this mostly for flavour. I'd like to hear by a member of the devteam before I dismiss this entirely.

Performance is just a rewritten version of Zin's Recite ability. - Just as I said to TwilightPhoenix, this is probably gonna be completely remade. It just fits thematically to the bard archetype.

It could nullify lullaby by harming everyone, and make whistler undesirable later in the game. - I'm not exactly sure how tension works so yeah this might suck when you are surrounded and the weapon starts screaming. If sleeping monsters don't add up to tension, the weapon wouldn't do the aoe sonic damage so it should be fine (they won't wake up). Also, when Whistler procures deafness, that might protect the monster from sonic damage, yet it adds a miscast chance to casters. It could lower Acc and EV to nerf melees too.

Some further ideas:

Screaming mutation is changed to Singing. Haedan gives you the Singing mutation at *, increasing it at *** and *****. - Seems pretty flavourful, I wouldn't mind adding it to the OP. Of course it messes things up with stealthy characters, but then you have lullaby which isn't affected by sounds so monsters won't wake up. It opens up another path as an alternative ****** extra to a noisy brand.

Reagents for God abilities just aren't fun. - True, but scrolls are plenty and you can always scum the abyss and Pan(?) for more. Please note that I changed my proposal for all scrolls to be eligible for praying over.